More Americans enjoy listening to their favorite tunes on portable music players. Well, who doesn't like doing workouts in the gym with Beyonce Knowles singing "Crazy in Love" on your music player? Who doesn't want to store all your favorite songs in just one compact gadget that you can carry around wherever you go?
With the boom of portable music players, the number of online downloading websites and file sharing networks has also increased. Case in point: It has been recorded that Americans have downloaded a total of about 243 million songs from peer-to-peer sharing networks and 26 million songs from online music stores in March 2005 alone. Although it may seem that the most popular way to download music clips is through Internet file sharing, online music store downloads are slowly catching up. In 2003, the ratio of households that buy music from online stores and those that get music from Internet file sharing is 1:20. But in 2005, it has drastically been reduced to 1:2.
There are a lot of reasons why people have slowly been purchasing music rather than downloading for free. Aside from more people owning music players, faster computers and broadband connections are also main factors why people purchase songs lately. Aside from those, people do not want spyware programs and viruses that come with free downloading. Lastly, people are also afraid of getting copyright infringement lawsuits from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
